Building an Agile Culture | HRDQ-U Webinars

Building an Agile Culture

This On-Demand event was originally presented on March 23, 2022 (60 min)
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Overview

The imperative to be adaptive couldn’t be made stronger than it has been in the pandemic. As organizations of all kinds face unprecedented volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, it is incumbent upon its people to adopt more agile ways of working. The movement of Agile software development has a lot to offer in terms of building teams that are adaptive, customer-centric, and efficient. But how can those same values and principles be applied to Human Resources?

While software development certainly is different from people leadership, both professions can benefit from key mindset shifts that are promoted by leading Agile thought—a lot of it comes down to how we communicate with the people we support.

In this webinar, sponsored by Vyond, certified Agile team facilitator Kevin Doherty will offer a primer on the Agile movement and mindset. Drawing from his expertise as a content creator, he’ll share practical ways to promote agility throughout the organization. By becoming champions of the Agile mindset and living out its values, people leaders can make a meaningful impact in their organization’s capacity to respond to—and even benefit from—large-scale disruption.

 

 

Attendees will learn

  • The Agile mindset that emerged from software development.
  • Key values and principles of the Agile mindset.
  • How to relate Agile ideals to the work of human capital management.
  • How to apply practical ideas to make your HR team more Agile.
  • How to identify opportunities to promote agile in all areas of your organization.

Presenter

Kevin Doherty is the marketing communications manager at Vyond, an online platform for creating your own animated content. Kevin specializes in applying principles from the entertainment industry to how we communicate with an audience and is an ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Team Facilitation.

Connect with Kevin on FacebookTwitter, and at www.vyond.com.

Sponsor

Sponsor Logo | HRDQU
Vyond

At Vyond, our mission is to put the power of video in the hands of everyone. Vyond allows people of all skill levels in all industries and job roles to create dynamic and powerful media. With features that go beyond moving text and images, you can build character-driven stories or compelling data visualizations that engage audiences and deliver results. Founded as GoAnimate in 2007, Vyond has helped Global 2000 organizations, small businesses, and individuals produce their own videos easily and cost-effectively. Since its inception, the Company has served over 12 million registered users on six continents who have created more than 22 million videos.

Learn more about Vyond

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Everyone is talking about HRDQ-U webinars!

Building an Agile Culture

“Kevin shared great insights about Agile and also ideas for how to become more adaptive, which I can use when I facilitate my own webinars, zoom sessions and in-person sessions. Enjoyed the interactive polls!”

—Gail L.

Building an Agile Culture

“Kevin was great ! He was very helpful in bringing to life quite abstract concepts in a very clear and practical way.”

—Jorge D.

Building an Agile Culture

“Interesting topic and great presenter, I found this webinar very informative.”

—Lilla I.

6 Responses

  1. Question: Can you paint a picture of what agile method would look like, when applied to a small sized team, traditionally, run with water flow method, and the design industry?

    Answer: Yes, so my background is actually in content creation for software. So I’m really familiar with design teams. Do they graphic design teams, or people like talking about, know, design thinking? So the Agile mindset, especially can be adopted, even on teams of one. You can look up personal con bon, and you’ll get examples of that linked visualization template that I showed earlier today for workflows. For Teams of one. When you’re working on a small team basically, what you’re doing is you’re trying to bring that small team together, share the work, make it so that everyone’s accountable for the same outcomes, not different slices of work.

  2. Question: When it comes to being agile, focusing on the customer and results, can you still be inclusive, compassionate and caring for people?

    Answer: Absolutely. In fact, that focus on the customer and outcome. Really, I think we’re placing greater value on people rather than metrics, rather than goals or targets. We’re saying, actually, what I care most about is making a real difference for the people I serve, the people in my audience. And serving value means, inclusivity means considering diversity and representation and striving for equity. It means I’m learning systems that don’t serve people. And that means telling your closest colleagues like, hey, don’t worry about that super urgent deadline, like, we need to work at a sustainable pace. You have life going on, it’s OK, drop it. We’re gonna adapt to our current circumstances, and that’s OK.

  3. Question: How do you deal with people already having too many meetings to attend, nor to post having daily or weekly meetings?

    Answer: Yes, so for those who maybe aren’t familiar, many Agile framework or practices, like scrum or kanban, they have these daily stand-ups or daily huddle meetings, where everyone gets an update on their work every single day. That can be super daunting and if they’re facilitated incorrectly, they can absolutely just be a drain on everyone’s time and energy and morale. I’m still a big fan of them. I do think that having regular 10-minute meetings, even my team, we meet three times a week for 10 minutes just to check in. And those are all about like, OK, is anyone blocked on anything? Are there any questions? Anything we’re feeling stuck on, and then we break, and they don’t feel like they impede on our productivity too much. You know, if that doesn’t work for your team, then listen to your team.

  4. Question: What if your determination of what is valuable does not align with your immediate manager or higher levels of the department or organization? Who or where does that get discussed?

    Answer: So, I didn’t just visualize Scrum and Kanban here just to explain the concept. I visualized these ways of managing workflows because visualizing your work is huge and being able to talk about value, being able to talk about efficiency and speed. So I encourage you all to use tools like Asana or Trello or Jira, or Monday. Any of those task management software is available now because they all allow you to visualize your work in the same way that I’m showing with these gifts. Now, why am I talking about visualization when you’re talking about misalignment with stakeholders? Because when you visualize your work, and you make it visible to other people in the organization, including key stakeholders, it allows you to have these conversations about value. So that when your CEO comes here and says, actually, this is the most important thing, drop everything, you need to do this. You can actually show them your board, and we’re like, OK. So, like, relatively speaking, you’re saying it’s the most important, but how does it compare to this other most important thing that we have in progress? And, you know, where does this fit in? How do we move things around? And that tends to get everyone aligned.

  5. Question: What is the for review and blocked designations?

    Answer: I get that question a lot, especially when I’m training my teams on how we structure our work. So in both of these visualizations, I have a column for blocked, and I have a column for review. I think of review as ready for internal review. So, if we’re talking about your HR team, this is for maybe the manager or a key stakeholder, or just a peer to review your work. If that’s relevant. That’s where it can go to say, this is ready for someone else’s eyes. By comparison, I think of blocked as an external dependency. Like, we’re waiting on this contract to come back from this external vendor, or, we’re waiting on sign off from somebody outside our team.

  6. Thanks to all the attendees who joined us for the event! We’ve collected all of the Q&A from the webinar and shared it below. What other questions or comments do you have? Let’s keep this conversation going!

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